We Could Run Out of Hard Drives Soon, Says Analyst

Gus Richard from Piper Jaffray told Cnet that "we could run out of drives by the end of November."

Caused by the dramatic flooding in Thailand, hard drive prices have already shot up by 10 to 60 percent, but Richard is concerned that PC manufacturers especially are not taking enough precaution to deal with the shortage.

"Nobody seems to be really paying attention. Everyone overreacted to the disaster in Japan. And now I think they're underreacting," he told Cnet. The estimate is that supply will fall about 60 million units short of a demand of 180 million drives and PC manufacturers will not be not able to meet demand with the units they can produce.

However, while Richard believes that shipments could drop by 5 to 10 million units because of the shortage, the supply problem is likely to spill over into Q1 2012 and affect 10 to 20 million units. In Q1, the expected shortage may be between 60 to 80 million units as lack of supply in Q4 is carried over into the new year.

As a reseller primarily of storage based products we are seeing first hand the effect of this on our business. Prices and availability to us from distributers are currently reviewed and updated at least twice a day with extreme limited stock and increases in prices to ourselves from between 25-250% depending on make and models of drives. Due to this we are having to limit customers to 1 drive per order which as hard drives are related to 80% of our products is a huge headache though we are doing our best to keep prices as low as possible we are governed by the prices we have to pay.